Ambiguity in general can be a powerful tool; it pervades our lives, but not for all of us in the same way. Communication partners typically assume that they understand each other well, as if their meanings are being clearly expressed and understood. This pervasive myth tends not to be examined because people understand each other well enough that their mutual disconnection doesn’t tend to cause noticed problems.
Which brings me to offer not another story, but rather an apology... of sorts, along with a description of how this mismatch can lead to a severe sense of isolation.
It looks like it will take me a little while to get there.
* * *
“I cannot recommend this candidate highly enough.”
When it comes to writing letters of recommendation, that phrase is poison. Seasoned committee members recognize it to mean, “This person has not only failed to impress me, but (a) I am not in a position to either avoid writing this letter or be entirely honest with them (so they are a social and/or safety hazard), and (b) they have asked for an open copy of this letter (so they are afraid of a truly candid appraisal).” The sentence offers the author plausible deniability by being worded to sound like praise, and it can be embedded in an otherwise positive recommendation.
Other such phrases include the likes of, “I have seen many examples of their work that would surprise you,” “Words fail to adequately describe my high regard,” and, “No one would be a better choice.” This type of ambiguity requires our understanding that the author could have written something much clearer in its positive regard, such as, “This candidate always earns my highest praise.”
Could have, but didn’t.
* * *
Some people can type without ever looking at the keyboard, while others have to hunt down each keystroke they peck. Me, at any given moment, I’m at one end of the scale or the other without ever actually spending any quality time in the middle. I can type away like crazy, but then I’ll suddenly realize that I haven’t been looking down for a while and my fingers will start to drift. For a couple of sentences I can force myself to keep looking at the screen, but then my words will all start to go like this because I lose my place. Dang it, that was supposed to be an wxample of ehat ha[[ens when I start thimkling anpouit typing instead of juyst doing ity. There, that’s be55er.
After an aware episode like that, I’ve got to type while looking at the keyboard for a while, rather than the screen, until I can rely on the muscular memory that normally keeps my fingers on track. Give me a few lines and a bit of distraction, and I’ll be back on automatic.
(I just recently found out that some sorts of finger-related muscle-memory practice, such as an hour on the guitar, can render a temporary target shift for touch typists, such as a downward misalignment, as in typing ‘v’ for ‘f’, ‘m’ for ‘j’, and so on. I think that’s cool.)
The thing is, I’m the same way when it comes to understanding other people. I’m fine (i.e., as oblivious as they are) until I start to think about what I’m doing, and then suddenly it takes a lot of extra effort to keep from messing up. Unfortunately, I often think about what I’m doing.
* * *
Maybe you’ve heard about people who have trouble reading facial expressions, people who don’t click socially. Maybe you’ve heard about them in descriptions of autism or schizotypy. Regardless, the equation’s not that simple; there are more variations along that dimension than just “understanding” and “not.”
In addition, there are people who can read emotions well, but who cannot write their emotions with equal ease for someone else to read; in other words, they’re fine on input, but poor on output. Most of these people also have a problem with the feedback loop, so even though they can read emotions well, they aren’t adept at using what they’ve just read to alter what they’re about to say. In case it’s not already glaringly obvious, I’m one of those people. While I don’t tend to say things that are strikingly callous or insensitive, I can drift away from noticing when I’ve lost someone in the conversation.
My brain compounds this problem by making me aware of ambiguous meanings in everything, which means that I can’t quickly figure out what to say when I want to express only one meaning, and I can’t quickly rule out the risk of every other meaning that might cause a misunderstanding. (I used to be much better at this than I am now.) I don’t know what I can safely not explain.
Ignoring those alternatives is a high-risk choice for me because people seem to treat me with the deficit of the doubt, rather than the benefit; in fact, sometimes it feels like they will go well out of their way to hear the worst. I can say, “That color looks particularly nice on you,” and they will insist on hearing, “I am highly critical of you and your whole genetic lineage,” instead of, “Unexpectedly seeing you has brightened my day.”
My resulting reflex to head any pain off at the pass causes additional trouble when I’m in a hurry, and of course most of my conversations are hurried. I’m on a serious time delay. Hours later I think to myself, “I probably should have said so-and-so, just to make sure they didn’t think I meant such-and-such.” I have loads of mental conversations that involve those sorts of sos and suches.
The upshot is that while I live with my foot in my mouth, it’s not because I’m an insensitive bastard; it’s just that I have trouble anticipating how or what my words will make someone else feel quickly enough to filter what I’m going to say. I am overly sensitive to all of the alternative interpretations. Either that or I’m surrounded by people who are continually going out of their way to be angry with me, and that doesn’t seem likely.
That’s all I really wanted to say, and now that I’ve said it, you might want to stop reading right here and go on about your business so much the wiser, unless of course you’re interested in the details; for example, maybe you know (or are) someone like me. In that case, welcome to the rest of this passage, but by now you should know that I have a tendency to rattle on long after my audience insists that they were dropping increasingly-less-than-subtle hints that they are no longer nearly as interested as they once had been.
Okay, well, you’ve been warned.
And, for what it’s worth, sorry about that.
* * *
To begin with, I am beyond lexithymic; that is to say, I enjoy (and cultivate) an unusually rich emotion-related lexicon (with thesaurus editor vibing), and I spend a lot of time exploring which of my different experiences of detailed feelings are captured most comfortably by which manner of narrative descriptions... as in my various writings.
In distinct contrast, my mom is alexithymic, as was her mother, which dawned on my family (in this specific way) only a few short months ago. Her reaction to my dad’s death was unusually sparse and pragmatic (“When can we get rid of the hospital bed?”), and was not viably attributable to the likes of denial or grief; after that, there was an intense crystallization of understanding among us about our family’s history. The prolonged clattering of dominoes practically woke the entire neighborhood. (Sorry about that, Fred.)
Now, when it comes to the availability of this vocabulary (lexi-) of feelings (-thymia), languages only tend to develop words in proportion to their need in conversation; therefore, because people by-and-large don’t tend to pursue many emotional subtleties, contemporary language inventories tend to be inadequate to my personal task. Which means that I am often at a loss for an appropriate word, and end up having to use much longer phrases. If you’ve ever talked with me at any length, or read my materials, then you’ll know what I mean.
This leads us to a crucial point that is being made with increasing fervor by divers diverse groups of disenfranchised people:
Being left out of the world’s languages can feel isolating.
Any determined ignorance by the isolators makes that incarceration feel more intense.
Outright denial of that isolation makes the effects feel punishing and inflammatory.
While fighting the isolaters who prefer it that way is liberating,
being left with no viable option but to fight such isolaters is traumatizing.
And the most painfully isolating factor of all is when the ignorance and denial and stubborn misunderstanding comes from those people who are supposed to be our loved ones.
Why are you making us fight you for our selfhood?
To be clear: I am not a person who has been systemically oppressed in our culture over their races, genders, ethnicities, preferences, orientations, disabilities, or any other such classifiers. I lay zero claim to having been so treated. I have led the privileged life of an abled straight white guy (he/him) who has also been mostly big and tall. (There are pictures at the end of this book.)
That said (with utter sincerity), I do empathize the hell out of being systemically traumatized by the dominant paradigmers. I am the loving parent and uncle of neurodiverse (and neuroidiosyncratic or neuroexcurgent) and transgender children (who are now adults). I am a devoted teacher of students with intensely special needs. And I feel how it hurts when my own disabilities become apparent to people with whom I am interacting, in large part because I am otherwise so abled (such as in my general intelligence, and my lexithymia in specific) that my compensatory strategies are successful in feeding the assumption that I am entirely abled... right up until it all goes to shit.
I have been putting one whole hell of a lot of energy into masking without ever really thinking about it in that way.
I finally understand that I have been fighting myself for my selfhood.
* * *
To continue, I definitely know what emotions are. I curate a fantastic menagerie of them, and I feel them deeply and in differentiating detail. I can recognize emotions in other people, often skimming right along in a conversation and fitting in without a problem; however, it doesn’t take much for me to suddenly notice that I haven’t been looking at the keyboard for a wghile, and then eberything starts to fgo all fummy.
When that happens, and I realize that I’m drifting out of sync with a communication partner, I can deliberately spend the extra effort to be vigilant about nuances of tone and body language, and that helps me to keep in touch. And because I have an exceedingly analytic (and holistic, for that matter) approach, I can take all of that information and stay in the game, but just like any effortful mental exercise, it’s very tiring.
And that’s what tends to happen when things are otherwise going well.
* * *
But things are not going well when...
I start to feel anxious about the impending consequences of iteratively distant drift, such as my hurting someone’s feelings, and/or a communication partner becoming so annoyed with me (as well as irritated) that they display varieties of aggression (even hostility of varying degrees of openness).
I feel increasingly helpless (and therefore desperate) when people manifest their responses as defenses (and accusations), as if my lack of sync were deliberate abuse. I present as cognitively abled, so the assumption is that my choices are controlled and deliberate. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) sets in (which is another recent realization), and my control slips away.
I express my fear that things will get even worse if we’re not careful, which can be taken as an attempt to deflect and direct blame, and then the focal topic becomes one of making me confess to my intent to be abusive. I writhe as I feel pinned down to prevent my escape.
Then I get told what I’m really feeling, as if someone else is the authority on what my real emotions are; at that point, I’m not really even there anymore. I’ve been erased... functionally replaced by their fantasy puppet villain.
When that happens, I am entirely trapped.
* * *
I say that I need a break, but I am told no, that I need to stay there and listen to certain things.
In the face of that inability to escape, I melt down.
On occasion, I have hit myself on the sides of my head with intense frustration.
I even bit myself once, when my display elicited laughter.
That was unexpected.
I got slapped in the face for it.
Took me a couple of (mildly) medicated therapy years to fully wind down from that traumatic episode.
* * *
It was only recently that I learned about the relevance of the inability to escape in that dynamic. The underlying mechanics are complicated, and an adequate discussion requires <a href="WellDuh.xhtml">its own chapter</a>.
Suffice to say, feeling trapped is the primary trigger for my meltdowns.
While I am highly sensitive, the sensory load doesn’t tend to affect me because I am able to control my exposure.
With help (and my sluggishly increasing awareness), I have trained myself to ask for a break. When I get one, that can be very helpful indeed; usually, I will take that time to go off by myself and write about what I am feeling. That combination lets me get my thoughts into some sort of order, taming the swarm into a murmuration.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, my plea often gets ignored. Some people demand to nail my feet to the floor while they make their point. They think that I am trying to leave with the last word, or that I am playing some other dominance game, so they exert further control.
Maybe that’s a necessary strategy when one’s danger voice must be brought to bear, and you need to make sure that your oppressor isn’t ignoring you (again). But such an occasion should be a rarity, occurring when the participants have been unable to avoid an adversarial context.
It’s not a nice thing to do to anyone about whom you care, and it’s a worse thing to do to someone who is struggling to keep a grip on a reaction over which they have little volitional control. Treating them like they are just throwing a tantrum is even worse: it’s shaming.
I have been told that my meltdowns are a traumatic stress reaction to a lifetime of being subjected to my dad’s lectures. That certainly made it worse; however, you wouldn’t say that a child with autism had sensory meltdowns because they had been raised in an arcade. You wouldn’t excuse your own behavior by blaming the arcade. Rather, we know that that the child was born with their sensitivities, and having to spend their life in an arcade is their nightmare.
* * *
In general, I feel trapped when I am not being heard, and rejected when someone is imposing their reductionist reality on what I am feeling.
For example, I can say that I am feeling some mild amount of disquiet over some misgivings arising from my projection of how things are going, and that this concern is leading to some apprehension on my part; in response, they tell me that I am wrong about how I feel, and that I am actually anxious or fearful or angry with them (when I am not). Their demand to assert their authority over how I feel is invalidating.
I try to keep from being scrubbed out. I try to retain my authority over my emotional self-awareness. I can point out that I am not experiencing any of the physical signs of anxiety, and that I am not feeling any of the reflexes around fear. I can point out that my peculiar lexicon allows me to accurately portray detailed distinctions in my own feelings (dammit), but then I get interpreted as implying that the other person isn’t as capable of doing that for themself.
That’s not what I mean.
Without regard to the actual skills of any given conversation partner, I am better with emotional vocabulary than most people. I practice. I deliberately seek out that vocabulary, and it was one of my favorite topics when proofreading Roget’s.
So don’t tell me how I “really” feel.
Being erased in this manner can then bring me to actually feel anxious, and trapped, and then I can feel myself wiping out.
And then, having thus driven me to distraction, they say, “See? Told ya so.”
At that point, my escalating distress is interpreted as a tantrum instead of a meltdown.
* * *
When other aspects of my life wear me down, such as a heavy workload and a loss of sleep, I start to lose the ease of my connection with people in my life because I just don’t have the resources necessary to play the conversation game all the time. I can choose to let work suffer instead, but my loved ones seem to like me not to get myself fired, either.
Plus I don’t really tend to differentiate thought from feeling from belief. They are integrated for me. So while I know what emotions are, mine tend to have thought and belief mixed in with them, which makes for a difficult match with most other people.
Think about what it was like when you were learning to do anything that you now take for granted, such as driving, speaking another language, reading, juggling, pooping in the potty, or doing your job. Talking with people is one of those things. (Well, okay, it is actually several of them.) Now imagine what it would be like if you suddenly lost your automaticity with any of those things. What if talking to other people was not automatic anymore?
You’d have to deliberately identify the tone of voice on each word, plus the contour over the whole phrase, and then remember all of that as you tucked it away with everything else the person was saying. You’d also need to watch for things like body language, sarcasm, humor, signals for taking conversation turns, and everything else that goes into making sure that you don’t accidentally piss someone off while you’re talking with them. Carefree would become careful.
Now take this another step: think about living in a culture where the response to any misunderstanding is to assume that your partner is intentionally trying to be hurtful (e.g., snide, sarcastic, caustic, sniping, and so on). Everyone else still uses this skill so effortlessly that they have no reflex around assuming that you might just be failing challenges. They find it so easy to keep from hurting people that you must be doing it on purpose.
It’s discouraging enough that it persuades some folks to give up trying to have conversations altogether. And some do.
While I don’t know what the reality is in the broader world, when it comes to my own personal life experience, I find that (as a generalization) women and men tend to treat me differently in this regard, although there are notable exceptions.
Now, people who have known me for some time, but who do not actually know me very well, simply treat me like I’m an uncouth idiot, or a verbal incontinent.
Then there are the people who know me at least well enough to ask, “Did you mean to make me feel like an idiot?” That gives me a chance to clarify. If I’m lucky, I don’t dig a deeper hole: “All I meant was that I don’t understand.”
The handful of people who actually know me well save time by assuming the best rather than the worst, and I can relax. When I can relax, I can stay on autopilot longer.
* * *
So, yes, I exhibit behavior that is consistent with the strange traits that run in my family, but it’s far too simple to just write me off as someone who has some form of autism/schizotypy/rejectivity and therefore can’t read people’s emotions. It’s also too simple to just dismiss me as some combination of male, oblivious, and/or self-absorbed. I can tell very quickly when someone has been hurt, because I feel their pain when it happens. (Thank you mirror neurons, strong empathy levels, a naturally other-centered focus, and even my BII phobia.)
I try very hard not to hurt people’s feelings.
I do care about the effect that my words will have.
I am more interested in what other people want than in what I want.
It’s just that I get very, very tired from all of that trying… no matter where I go, or with whom I talk, day in and day out.
Know what I mean?